In a typical network environment, such as an electronic marketplace, users can search for information using an approach such as specifying several keywords to be used in generating a query to search for related information. In one example, users are able to search for information about a specific item by providing a search engine with information such as the name of the item, manufacturer of the item, and/or characteristics of the item. Most search engines typically organize information and data by relevancy to keywords. In an electronic marketplace, for example, this allows users to locate items offered through the marketplace that then can be purchased or otherwise consumed by a user by selecting one of the available items. Advantages of purchasing from/through an electronic marketplace are numerous. For example, an electronic marketplace can include offers for items from several different merchants, parties, or sources, for example, whereby users (e.g., customers) can compare several offers for an item, where each offer corresponds to a different source, and may include different terms, such as merchant-specific pricing, shipping charges, promotions, conditions, and quality, etc.
However, in such network environments there is no way to return information that is not yet available somewhere across the network. For example, most electronic marketplaces do not provide a way to locate an item that will be available for purchase in the future but is not currently available through the marketplace. While some electronic marketplaces might offer pre-orders for certain items, this still requires a certain amount of knowledge and information about an item, and requires that the information be entered into the system providing the marketplace. In order to locate items that are not available through the marketplace, users may have to periodically conduct a search for the items. This is very tedious and time consuming. Further, information about such unavailable items is not generally stored by the electronic marketplace until the items are introduced in commerce or become available within the electronic marketplace. In such a case, the electronic marketplace is not able to recommend other items that users may be interested in as an alternative purchasing option since there is no information available for comparison to identify such items.